With the rapid development of the electronics industry and the constant development of communication technologies, the application and management mode of information technology (IT) has gradually developed from a separate and discrete set of functional resources into an operation mode that uses a data center as a main working platform. The data center generally includes a server rack, an air conditioning system, a power distribution device, and an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and forms a centralized computing facility in the form of a computer room together with a building or container that accommodates the above components.
Although container data centers provide a more timely solution according to use requirements, such container data centers only save capital expenditures at an initial stage considering a long-term use. Moreover, they are only suitable for an instant application solution and may no longer be suitable for subsequent application solutions after a period of time and therefore need to be replaced, which results in a waste of resources.
A data center that uses a building as a structural appearance may be designed and constructed according to specific needs of customers. Such a physical data center has a long construction period. Generally, it takes several months to one year from feasibility study to concept design, preliminary design, solution design, detailed design and construction design. The construction of the building takes about half a year; and the supply, connection and installation, and commissioning of each electro-mechanical device in the data center take another three to four months. Thus the overall construction of the data center needs to take 1 to 2 years. If several data center projects are started at the same time and each project has a special design, an enterprise has to spend a lot of time and labor on the management and implementation of the projects.
Furthermore, since there is a limitation on the data processing amount in the initial stage, after the construction of such physical data center is finished, generally it is impossible or difficult to expand the number of buildings for accommodating server racks according to the use needs; and feasibility assessment, design and construction procedures must be carried out again for the buildings (for example, infrastructure facilities such as an office area and a general device area, a main computer room for placing server racks, and facilities such as a connecting passage between the infrastructure facilities and the main computer room), the power distribution facility and the cooling facility of the data center, which causes long time for construction of the data center and limits the flexibility of the data center in use.
In addition, with the rapid development of the information industry, requirements for various hardware are changing constantly. The existing physical data center is built based on a configuration solution of buildings and electro-mechanical systems, and a delivery is completed after IT devices are deployed. Therefore, upon the completion, the existing architecture may not be flexibly compatible with multiple power distribution technologies and evolution of different densities of server racks, and may not switch between different data center availability tiers according to the use needs.
Meanwhile, the current cooling mode of data centers is mainly based on room-level precision air conditioners or row-level precision air conditioners. Such cooling devices usually have a small capacity that is not sufficient for use, and the chilled water system and delivery pipes have a complex design which cannot be easily deployed. In case of a large-scale air handling unit (AHU), although it has a simple and efficient cooling system, it generally has to be placed at the top layer of the building or on two sides of the building, which causes that its cooling design may satisfy only data centers on a single floor in the computer room (that is, disposed at a same horizontal position) and may not provide a cooling function for data centers that are distributed on different floors (that is, at different horizontal positions); therefore, it is not suitable to use a stack form as the layout pattern of the data centers in the computer room to accommodate more server racks, and limits the data processing amount and the processing performance of the data center.